Her Eyes With Light Grow Brighter
by Nimue Ailinen
Summary: She seeks out the sunlight, because it helps her to pretend she's human again. One-shot, Adelle-centric.


**Title: **Her Eyes With Light Grow Brighter

**Fandom: **Dollhouse

**Rating:** PG

**Warnings:** Spoilers for Epitaph One

**Prompt: **_"The sun came out, and I walked on my feet and heard with my ears. I hate the bits, the bits that stay down and I work, I f-function like I'm a girl. I hate it because I know it'll go away! The sun grows dark and chaos has come again."_ (River - Firefly)

**Summary:** She seeks out the sunlight because it helps her to pretend she's human again. One-shot, Adelle-centric, 571 words.

**Author's Notes:** The title is taken from _The Sunlight of the Soul_, which is a lovely poem by James Jennings.  
Written for a fic contest at whedonland on LJ, where it took both 3rd place and Mod's Choice. Not bad for my 2nd published bit of fic ever, eh?

Standard disclaimers apply. Not mine, etc., etc.

* * *

Once in a great while, a single beam of sunlight manages to break through the clouds and smoke that constantly cover the sky and find its way to Earth. It's a one in a million chance that one of the weak streams of sunlight might happen to land on the House, but every so often, it happens. And every single time a beam of light comes shining through one of the once-pristine windows, Adelle finds herself standing in it. She doesn't do it for the meager warmth the light provides (she'd get more heat downstairs in the House itself than she'll ever get in the cold, drafty space that was once her office), nor does she do it out of some strange desire to tan – no, she stands in the sunlight because it makes her feel alive, because it makes her feel like maybe she might be human after all. She stands there and she lets it all fade away, so that she can pretend she's a real girl – a real _person _– inside.

She tries her hardest not to think when she's in the sun. It's her happy place, her own little moment of Zen, and she refuses to let the guilt that gnaws her day and night destroy the tenuous inner peace the sun provides. (She never thought she'd need something so … juvenile as a "happy place", but it's turned out to be as necessary to her survival as food and water and air.) In the sun, she feels like she can function normally, as if maybe there's some small part of her, some piece of her soul not overwhelmed with despair and regret, that can find it's way to the front of her mind and start to help her heal.

She thought she was doing good (or so she tells herself). She thought she was helping people, and perhaps she was – until somebody higher up went power mad, until a single phone call to a million different people in a million different cities turned a world made up of shades of grey into a world separated into two very distinct sides: those who answered the phone, and those who did not. She thought she was helping people, and when she's in the sun, she tries to remember that, just as she tries to forget the ever-present fact that no matter what it was that she _thought,_ in the end, she was just as responsible for the end of the world as whoever it was that authorized that phone call. Sometimes, just sometimes, she actually manages to forget for a second, and pretend she was doing good after all.

Even on those rare moments when she's completely calm, though, there's still a tiny part of her that hates the light, hates it's cleansing warmth, because Adelle knows, she just _knows _that sooner or later, she'll have to move – and the moment she steps back into the shadows, the knowledge of what she's wrought will overtake her again. She fears the shadows more than she fears anything else – more than she fears the Butchers, more than she fears the dolls (the _others_, she reminds herself, because they aren't dolls anymore), more than she ever feared Alpha – because it's in the shadows that she has to face up to what she's done. Because it's in the shadows that she has to face the fact that she isn't really human after all.

* * *

You know what to do...


End file.
